Outside The Box

Sometimes our discussions here don’t appear to be very complimentary of younger generations, and that is a misconception I wish to rectify.

Every generation has a tendency to disparage its replacement, and hold it responsible for change that it finds undesirable. The older we get, the more we find it difficult to accept change. We forget sometimes that it is the duty of youth to test boundaries, and sometimes to redraw them. We also forget who their parents are.

Proverbs tells us, “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it,” but our children missed out on some of that training. It began before us, but my generation saw a significant departure from the age old tradition which kept a parent in the home to raise the children. The economy did not encourage that, and it took two incomes just to make ends meet. Who created that economy? Our parents did.

My generation invented the internet and ushered in the Age of Information. Given every opportunity and convenience by parents who wanted better for their children, we became narcissistic in the pursuit of our gratifications. We created a culture and an economy which conditions its members for gratification through consumption. We abandoned faith in the Creator, love of country and adherence to a moral code. Then as prodigal children returning, we see the results of our failure to pass along those principles in our offspring now grown, and blame them for their shortcomings.

But just how “bad” is it that so many people are not optimistic about the future? I think it depends to a certain extent on where you get your information. If your information comes, for example, from Fox News or The Daily Mail, then look out, because the sky is falling every time the news breaks. If there is one Associate Professor of Rage in one junior college anywhere in this nation of 330 million, they will sift through every pixel until they find that person and report on what they said.

Every celebrity millionaire basketball player victimized because of her race gets space on the front page. Every angry exhortation from the View of Idiots who dominate the pixel universe is reported. Every shot fired, every crime committed, and every departure from civil society is sifted from the vast panoply of human action and presented for the shaping of our attitudes and actions.

Based on that presentation of reality, the situation does appear to be rather dire. Reporting from my own experience, however, and including only those things I have personally witnessed, a completely different version of reality emerges.

We have a young friend who took his engineering degree to Africa for two years of service doing missionary work. Another friend with barely 30 years under his belt just bought his first house. He has done tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan and works now in law enforcement, putting his life on the line every day. We know young nurses who worked their way through school in pursuit of their credentials. Others young people we know lead lives less dramatic but just as meaningful, holding down jobs, raising families, taking responsibility for their children’s lives.

To paraphrase Albert J. Nock from his essay, “Isiah’s Job,” civilization is not carried by the masses. It is nurtured and protected, and rebuilt when necessary, by the “Remnant.” Those with “the force of intellect” to recognize truth and the “force of character” to act on it.

We don’t hear about this remnant often enough. Some of our biggest pixel pushers would have us believe that the remnant is difficult to impossible to find among the devolving youth of our civilization. They are not hard to find, however if you bother to look, and sometimes they hide in plain sight.